The Future of Websites: CMS or Website Builder Tools?

When the open source WordPress blogging platform first came out, it opened up the world of internet publishing to the masses. Sure, there were website builders out there like GeoCities and Angelfire, but they lacked much and were very ugly. When WordPress came along it gave voice to those willing to overcome the barriers of setting up web hosting and installing the software. These days there are much better website builders for the common person. Squarespace being a standout of the group even has an easy to use e-commerce option. Because of this, the roles of many popular Content Management Systems (CMS)s are shifting.

Squarespace is the new WordPress

While WordPress usage is higher than ever, it seems that a large portion of the DIY and personal site market is shifting to services like Squarespace. It makes sense, since Squarespace and its ilk (Wix, Weebly, etc) are often easier and cheaper in the long run. With hosting and support rolled into one cost, it simplifies everything. People building personal sites and even small business sites have been migrating over to these kinds of site builders more and more every year. The trend is sure to keep rising as these services start to offer e-commerce and other business tools.

WordPress doing more than ever

WordPress really hasn’t changed all that quickly over the years, but what has changed is the ways in which people are using it. It’s still deep-down a blogging platform, but people have extended it to be much more of a full CMS. The sheer number of developers familiar with WordPress development is what has pushed it to be the top open source CMS on the web today. WordPress is now the CMS of choice for most small to medium sized enterprise sites, and it is increasingly capable of more on more complexity, potentially pushing middling tools like Joomla more and more into the fringes of the the market and perhaps eventual irrelevance. WordPress is probably going to continue to be the top CMS for at least the next few years as more web design and marketing agencies make it a cornerstone of their services. WordPress at it’s core doesn’t seem to be doing much to accommodate this new kind of usage that is beyond the blog. We are already starting to see the bubble burst as these sites are requiring more functionality than WordPress can handle and many end up being more custom code than WordPress. It will be interesting to see if WordPress adapts or loses share in the enterprise world over the next few years.

Drupal framework more of a framework

Drupal has always been viewed as more of a framework than a CMS. With the release of Drupal 8, Drupal has doubled down on the framework concept incorporating the Symfony PHP ecosystem into it’s core. Drupal 8 has become the perfect option for large Drupal 7 sites that have begun to outgrow what Drupal 7 can do. Drupal 8 has positioned itself to be a viable option for many web based apps and can easily beat out non-CMS frameworks such as Laravel in terms of development speed and scalability. Drupal 8 is filling the functionality gap that WordPress just can’t do. I predict that enterprise migrations from WordPress to Drupal 8 are going to be on the rise over the next couple of years as businesses require more of what the internet has to offer.

Which platform you go with will depend on your website needs. Small brochure type sites will easily find a home on one of the instant site builders and those with strong WordPress understanding might continue to use Wordpress. We at Ashday strongly believe that Drupal will be able to serve a wide-range of needs for a long time to come. The stability and scalability has only improved with the latest iteration and in the hands of the right team it can be made to do just about anything.